I didn’t expect my first Web Summit to feel the way it did. Everywhere I looked, someone was showcasing a new AI tool or workflow, each one promising it could do everything for you in seconds. It was exciting, until it tipped into something closer to overwhelming. When everything is claiming to solve everything, it becomes easy to lose sight of the one thing that makes design actually meaningful: purpose.
And that’s the irony. The more the industry accelerates, the more grounding we need. Purposeful design remains that anchor.
When the work is shaped around something real, a need someone genuinely has, a moment in their day that could be smoother, a problem quietly slowing them down, things start to come into focus. Your decisions move from feeling random to feeling part of a bigger picture.
Purposeful design always begins with a simple “why.” Not the big philosophical “why are we here?” but the straightforward, practical version: Why would someone use this? Why would this help? Why does this matter at all? When your project starts with that kind of honesty, everything else slides into place. Colour isn’t random. Language becomes clearer. Interaction moves away from “look how clever this design is” and toward “this actually helps someone do something.” You’re not just making something; you’re making something that has a reason to exist.
But the real secret, the part that gets lost in the rush to automate everything, is listening.
Proper listening. And oddly enough, that became clear to me while wandering the Web Summit floor, moving from stand to stand and hearing founders describe what their products could do. In between the polished pitches and technical jargon, the real insights came from the offhand comments they made when they relaxed a little, the small frustrations that shaped their ideas, the moments that sparked their solutions, the gaps they noticed in people’s behaviour.
Watching how they talked about their users, what they emphasised, and what they glossed over told me far more than the product demos themselves.
These tiny, human details are what reveal the real opportunities for design. When your work is built on those moments, what people actually do, not just what they claim they do, everything feels more grounded. You’re not just guessing what might work. Feedback becomes clearer. And suddenly the design process just makes more sense.
Some think that purposeful design limits creativity, but I’ve found it to be the opposite. Purpose gives creativity direction. It gives you a problem to solve and a direction to follow. It removes the pressure to add more and more and more. Your decisions stop competing with each other and start working together, and the process feels a little less like juggling and a little more like designing.
So, in an industry racing toward automation, purpose becomes the thing that keeps the work human. It stops us from building for trends and reminds us to build for people. And in a fast, loud, AI-everywhere world, design that actually helps someone, even in a small way, is still the thing that matters most.
